(Spoiler: we think it makes sense!)

The Facts

Mayor Lurie campaigned on a pledge to create 1,500 new emergency shelter beds within his first six months, touting the figure as late as March. As of today, 436 beds have been opened or announced, and the administration is changing tactics.

In an op-ed in The Standard, the Mayor's chief of health, homelessness, and family services, Kunal Modi, announced that the administration will no longer pursue a specific number of beds. Instead, they will shift funding to overhaul coordination, address root causes, and integrate health services.

The Context

San Francisco spends over $1 billion annually to fund more than 25,000 beds across homeless shelters, mental health treatment centers, and drug treatment centers, yet unsheltered homelessness remains stubbornly high.

Critics argue that setting an arbitrary bed-count goal ignored the complexity of addiction, mental illness, and the city's fractured network of service providers. While others say not prioritizing emergency shelter necessarily means people will stay in tents rather than indoors. Still others have argued that the only long-term solution is permanent supportive housing that is expensive and slow to build.

The GrowSF Take

Whether you consider this a strategic pivot or a failure depends on how you think about homelessness. If, like GrowSF, you acknowledge that SF's homelessness crisis is a mix of poverty, mental health problems, and drug abuse, then this change makes a lot of sense. Our existing system does work quite well for those who are just poor or down on their luck, but it fails those who lack the capacity to care for themselves.

If you think that simply giving people a bed to sleep in without treating their illnesses is enough, then you can consider this a failure. We think the reality is more complex than that, which is why we have repeatedly called for expanding the availability of drug treatment beds in addition to adding more shelter beds.

The outcome we seek is to get people off the street, into the services they need, and through our supportive housing system. If a metric like "beds" isn't going to get us to that, then we should pivot. Should the Mayor have known "beds" wasn't the right metric? Maybe. But campaign promises rarely stand up to the facts you learn on the job. In politics, one man's flip-flopper is another man's adaptive problem-solver.